I’m on a project where we need to collect metrics around a function named "Share a Story." The idea is very simple — kama wewe ni kuangalia katika makala ya kuvutia juu ya intranet na wanataka kushiriki kwa mtu, click a link labeled "Share this story" email ni rafiki yako.

Sisi alicheza karibu na fomu ya desturi kwa lengo hili, lakini mwisho, akili ya kawaida alishinda siku na sisi tu kutumia ukoo <href = mailto:…> technique. (<mailto href:…> ni ya kushangaza imara kidogo kidogo ya HTML; kama ziada, kiungo ambayo huleta mimi nyuma yangu ya zamani UNIX mtu siku kurasa; wale walikuwa siku!).

Mbinu hii hutoa interface kubwa kwa watumiaji wa mwisho kwani wao kupata kwa kutumia MS Outlook yao ukoo mteja (au chochote email mteja wao kuwa imewekwa).

Inafanya mambo magumu juu yetu aina developer maskini kwani wao mteja * pia * anataka kukimbia ripoti katika siku zijazo kwamba inaonyesha jinsi mara nyingi watumiaji wa kushiriki hadithi na hata hadithi ambayo ni pamoja mara nyingi.

We whiteboarded a few potential solutions. My favorite is to carbon copy (CC) a SharePoint list. That way, the end user still gets the outlook client while we get to capture the event because we’ll get a copy of the email ourselves. There are some obvious drawbacks. The main problem is that the user could simply blank out or otherwise mangle the CC address. Na, we need to manage that event library of emails. We have a scheduled job on the white board responsible for that cleanup.

Kama una baadhi ya mbinu wajanja kutatua tatizo hili, tafadhali kufanya kuwaambia.

</mwisho>

Kujiunga na blog yangu.

Kufuata yangu juu ya Twitter kwa http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Kama ombi na kuahidi, I’ve uploaded my presentation on how to obtain "great" requirements from end users for SharePoint projects and implementations. It’s here: http://cid-1cc1edb3daa9b8aa.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/SharePoint/Paul% 20Galvin% 20Great% 20Requirements.zip

Mimi kuwasilishwa katika mkutano huu SharePoint Best Practices katika Februari 2009 (www.sharepointbestpractices.com). If you attended the conference, utapata pia kupata hii katika DVD mkutano.

The presentation includes a lot of notes with most slides. It’s not just bullet points.

(See here for my other presentation on a governance case study: http://paulgalvin.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1CC1EDB3DAA9B8AA!3099.entry

</mwisho>

Kujiunga na blog yangu.

Kufuata yangu juu ya Twitter kwa http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Kama wengi SharePoint mshauri aina, I’ve been exposed to a lot of SharePoint functionality. Some times, I dive pretty deep. Other times I just notice it as I’m flying by to another set of menu options. One of those is "self-service site creation." I haven’t had a need for it until this week.

Wiki hii, I need to solve a business problem which I think is going to become more common as companies loosen up and embrace more direct end user control over SharePoint. Katika kesi hiyo, I’ve designed a site template to support a specific end user community. Folks in this community should be able to create their own sites at will using this template whenever the urge strikes them.

I recalled seeing "self-service site creation" before and I’ve always tucked that away in the back of my head thinking that "self service site creation" ni SharePoint Hands maana, ni wazi kutosha, something like "turn me on if you want end users to be able to create sites when they want to."

Hivyo, Mimi kugeuka juu, kujaribu nje na kwa ajili yangu, it’s not creating sites. It’s creating site makusanyo. Pretty big difference. That’s not what I want, si wakati wote.

It is possible to let end users create new sub sites via a custom permission level. This is exactly where I would have gone in the first place except that the label "self-service site creation" label deceived me. Via twitter, I learn that it’s deceived others as well 🙂

Mimi bado kazi nje ya jinsi ya kutoa kidogo ya mchakato wa zaidi harmoniserad wakati anakaa rena nje ya boksi, but there’s a definite path to follow. Just don’t get distracted by that label.

</mwisho>

Kujiunga na blog yangu.

Kufuata yangu juu ya Twitter kwa http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Mimi nilikuwa mmoja wa 20 au 30 (au labda 100?) panelists jana usiku katika New York SharePoint Watumiaji Group meeting. Instead of the usual presentation format, hii ilikuwa ni wote kuhusu Q&A between the audience and the panel members. Early on, Michael Lotter ilianzisha mimi wazo mpya na mimi alitaka kushiriki.

An audience member described how his company had paid a consultant to write an application for his company. The consultant wrote it as a console application using the SharePoint object model. Kama matokeo, this meant that the program had to be run on a server in the farm. This meant that anyone that wanted to use the app would have to log onto the server, do the work and log off. At first, hii si tatizo, lakini hivi karibuni, zaidi na zaidi (mashirika yasiyo ya kiufundi) users needed to use the utility. His question was (kufafanua):

"What are my options? I don’t want to keep letting users log directly onto the server, lakini wanahitaji kuwa utendaji."

Michael Lotter alipendekeza kuwa yeye configure mpya virtual mashine, join it to the farm as a WFE and let users run the application from there.

This is a pretty stunning idea for me. Generalizing this solution brings to mind the notion of essentially temporary, almost disposable WFE’s. I think it’s a pretty neat concept. This temporary WFE can run a console application that uses the SharePoint object model. You could also use it to run stsadm commands. It doesn’t have to be part of regular local balancing. If it goes down or gets wrecked, you can just spin up a new one. I repeat myself, lakini mimi tu kusema kwamba mimi nadhani ni wazo nadhifu kweli.

</mwisho>

Kujiunga na blog yangu.

Kufuata yangu juu ya Twitter kwa http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Wiki hii iliyopita, mtu aliuliza swali kuhusu kujenga mazingira SharePoint kwamba ingekuwa kushughulikia pretty juu kiasi cha nyaraka mpya (10,000 +/- katika kesi hii). I don’t know much about this, lakini shukrani kwa hii karatasi nyeupe, Najisikia vizuri zaidi habari.

Kwa ajili yangu, hii karatasi nyeupe ni pretty much tu alama kitabu wakati, but I did start reading through it and thought I’d highlight my main take-away. SharePoint can be scaled to handle, katika kiwango cha chini, mzigo huu:

• 50k mpya nyaraka kwa siku.
• 10 milioni nyaraka taarifa.

I write the 50k/10MM figures because they are easy enough to remember. As long as you know they are minimums, you won’t get into trouble. The maximums are at least 10 asilimia kubwa zaidi kuliko ile na kwa tuning uliokithiri, uwezekano mengi juu.

Shukrani, Mike Walsh, mara nyingine tena kwa wake kila wiki WSS Maswali updates na marekebisho baada ya. If you’re not subscribed to it, unapaswa umakini kufikiri juu ya kufanya hivyo.

</mwisho>

Kujiunga na blog yangu.

During the past week, my mwenzake and I were doing some work for a client in NYC. We were testing a different aspects of a MOSS implementation using their "standard" workstation build (as opposed to our laptops). While doing that, we ran into a few errors by following these steps:

• Open up an MS word document via windows explorer (which uses WebDAV).
• Make a change.
• Save it.

We came to realize that some times (usually the first time) we saved the document, the save didn’t "stick." Save did not save. We would pull that document back up and our changes simply were not there.

We didn’t understand the root issue at this point, but we figured that we should make sure that the latest MS Office service pack had been installed on that work station. The IT folks went and did that. We went through the test again and we discovered a new problem. When we saved it, we now got this error:

Wakati huu, it seemed like every change was, kwa kweli, saved, whether we answered Yes or No to the scripts question.

We finally had a look at the actual version of Office and it turns out that the workstation was running MS Office 2000 with service pack 3 which shows up under Help -> About as "Office 2002".

The moral of the story: I will always use Office 2003 as my minimum baseline office version when using WebDAV and MOSS.

</mwisho>

Kujiunga na blog yangu.

(For search engine purposes, this is the error’s text):

Line: 11807

Char: 2

Kosa: Object doesn’t support this property or method

Code; 0

URL: http://sharepoint01/DocumentReview/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?location=Documents/1210/testworddocument.doc&dialogview=SaveForm

Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?

In one or my very first blog posts, Mimi ilivyoelezwa mchakato wa jumla sisi ikifuatiwa kuhamia wateja kutoka SPS 2003 to MOSS. A reader left a comment asking for more detail and here it is.

Kwa kuwa mradi uhamiaji, tulikuwa na kutafuta njia nzuri kwa hoja mengi ya SPS 2003 documents over to MOSS. The initial load was easy enough. Create a new target document library in MOSS and use windows explorer to move the documents.

This is the new document library:

Open up two windows explorers. Point the first at SPS 2003 and the second at the new document library in MOSS. The following screen shot shows this. Note that the top browser is actually pointing at my c:\temp drive, but you can imagine it pointing to an SPS 2003 document library:

After that drag and drop operation, my target looks like this:

Now it’s time to deal with the metadata. Assume we have just one column of metadata for these documents named "location." We can see from the above "all documents" view that the location is blank. It’s easy enough to use a data sheet view to enter the location, or even go into each document’s properties one by one to add a location. Let’s assume that there is no practical way to assign the location column a value automatically and that end users must do this by hand. Aidha, let’s assume there are hundreds of documents (maybe thousands) and that it will take many many days to update the metadata. As we all know, no one is going to sit down and work for four of five days straight updating meta data for documents. Badala yake, they will break that out over a period of weeks or possibly longer. To facilitate this process, we can create an "untagged data" view as shown:

Sasa, when someone sits down to spend their allocated daily hour or two to tag migrated documents, they can use the "untagged documents" view to focus their effort:

As users tag documents, they drop off this list.

This notion of an untagged data view can also help with a class of data validation problem people inquire about on the forums. Nje ya boksi, there’s no way to prevent a user from uploading a document to MOSS and then not enter meta data. We can specify that a particular site column is mandatory and the user won’t be allowed to push the save button. Hata hivyo, if the user uploads and then closes the browser (or uses windows explorer to upload the document), we can’t force the user to enter meta data (tena, nje ya boksi).

This approach can be used to help with that situation. We can use a "poorly tagged data" view to easily identify these documents and correct them. Couple this with a KPI and you have good visibility to the data with drill-down to manage these exceptional circumstances.

</mwisho>

Kujiunga na blog yangu.

Wiki hii, I’ve struggled a bit with my team to get MOSS installed in a simple two-server farm. Having gone through it, Nina shukrani kubwa zaidi kwa kila aina ya matatizo ya watu kuripoti kwenye vikao MSDN na mahali pengine.

mwisho kilimo Configuration:

• SQL / Index / Intranet WFE ndani ya Firewall.
• WFE katika DMZ.
• Some kind of firewall between the DMZ and the internal server.

Before we started the project, we let the client know which ports needed to be open. During the give and take, back and forth over that, we never explicitly said two important things:

1. SSL means you need a certificate.
2. The DMZ server must be part of a domain.

Day one, we showed up to install MOSS and learned that the domain accounts for database and MOSS hadn’t been created. To move things along, we went ahead and installed everything with a local account on the intranet server.

Katika hatua hii, we discovered the confusion over the SSL certificate and, cha kusikitisha, decided to have our infrastructure guy come back later that week to continue installing the DMZ server. Katika maana wakati, we solution architects moved ahead with the business stuff.

A weekend goes by and the client obtains the certificate.

Our infrastructure guy shows up and discovers that the DMZ server is not joined to any domain (either a perimeter domain with limited trust or the intranet domain). We wasted nearly a 1/2 day on that. If we hadn’t let the missing SSL certificate bog us down, we would have discovered this earlier. Oh well….

Another day passes and the various security committees, interested parties and (not so) innocent bystanders all agree that it’s OK to join the DMZ server with the intranet domain (this is a POC, after all, not a production solution).

Infrastructure guy comes in to wrap things up. This time we successfully pass through the the modern-day gauntlet affectionately known as the "SharePoint Configuration Wizard." We have a peek in central administration and … yee haw! … DMZ server is listed in the farm. We look a little closer and realize we broke open the Champaign a mite bit early. WSS services is stuck in a "starting" hadhi.

Muda mrefu hadithi fupi, it turns out that we forgot to change the identity of the service account via central administration from the original local account to the new domain account. We did that, re-ran the configuration wizard and voila! We were in business.

</mwisho>

Kujiunga na blog yangu.

Ingawa ni kweli si halisi, kama suala la kivitendo, internet-yanayowakabili mtandao mbele ya mwisho katika DMZ lazima kuwa katika miliki ya (i.e. si baadhi server ilio katika workgroup yake mwenyewe kidogo). It doesn’t need to be in the same domain as the internal WFE(s) na mengine ya seva (na pengine lazima si), lakini inahitaji kuwa uwanja.

My colleagues and I spent an inordinate amount of time on a proposal which included SharePoint pre-requisites. This included a comprehensive list of firewall configurations that would enable the DMZ server to join the farm and so forth. Cha kusikitisha, sisi kushindwa kuongeza sentensi mahali fulani kwamba alisema, na athari, "the whole bloody point of this configuration is to allow your DMZ WFE server, katika uwanja, kujiunga na kilimo ndani."

dhoruba kamili ya matukio ya, ambapo sisi kimsingi inaonekana kushoto wakati sisi tupate kuwa inaonekana haki, fitina kuficha tatizo hili kutoka kwetu mpaka haki marehemu katika mchakato, hivyo kuzuia yangu kutoka kwa kuliungama yangu "kuwaambia habari mbaya mapema" kutawala.

Sigh.

Kujiunga na blog yangu.

Forum users frequently as questions like this:

> Hujambo,
>
> Tafadhali niambie kama kuna uwezekano wa kujenga orodha ya desturi na
> bwana na undani aina (kama ankara) without using InfoPath.
>

SharePoint hutoa baadhi ya nje ya makala sanduku kwamba msaada wa aina ya mahitaji ya biashara kama kwamba.

Kwa ujumla, one links two lists together using a lookup column. List A contains the invoice header information and list B contains invoice details.

Use additional lists to maintain customer numbers, product numbers, nk.

Use a content query web part (in MOSS only) and/or a data view web part to create merged views of the lists. SQL Server Reporting Services (SRS) is also available for the reporting side of it.

Hata hivyo, there are some important limitations that will make it difficult to use pure out-of-the-box features for anything that is even moderately complex. These include:

• Size of related lookup lists vs. "smartness" of the lookup column type. A lookup column type presents itself on the UI differently depending on whether you’ve enabled multi-select or not. In either case, the out-of-the-box control shows all available items from the source list. If the source list has 1,000 vitu, that’s going to be a problem. The lookup control does not page through those items. Badala yake, it pulls all of them into the control. That makes for a very awkward user interface both in terms of data entry and performance.
• Lookups "pull back" one column of information. You can never pull back more than one column of information from the source list. Kwa mfano, you cannot select a customer "12345" and display the number as well as the customer’s name and address at the same time. The lookup only shows the customer number and nothing else. This makes for an awkward and difficult user interface.
• No intra-form communication. Nimeandika kuhusu hili hapa. You can’t implement cascading drop-downs, masharti kuwawezesha / afya ya mashamba, nk.
• No cascading deletes or built-in referential integrity. SharePoint treats custom lists as independent entities and does not allow you to link them to each other in a traditional ERD sense. Kwa mfano, SharePoint inaruhusu kujenga orodha mbili desturi, "customer" and "invoice header". You can create an invoice header that links back to a customer in the customer list. Kisha, you can delete the customer from the list. Nje ya boksi, there is no way to prevent this. To solve this kind of problem, ungependa kawaida kutumia handlers tukio.

Inaweza kuonekana hatarini, but I would still use SharePoint as a starting point for building this kind of functionality. Though there are gaps between what you need in a solution, SharePoint unatuwezesha kujaza mapengo wale kutumia zana kama vile:

• Event handlers. Use them to enforce referential integrity.
• Desturi nguzo: Create custom column types and use them in lieu of the default lookup column. Add paging, buffering na makala AJAX kuwafanya msikivu.
• BDC. This MOSS-only feature enables us to query other SharePoint lists with a superior user interface to the usual lookup column. BDC can also reach out to a back end server application. Use BDC to avoid replication. Rather than replicating customer information from a back end ERP system, use BDC instead. BDC features provide a nice user interface to pull that information directly from the ERP system where it belongs and avoids the hassle of maintaining a replication solution.

  BDC ni hulka MOSS (si inapatikana katika WSS) and is challenging to configure.

• ASP.NET mtandao fomu: Kuunda full-featured AJAX-enabled fomu kwamba anatumia kitu SharePoint mfano wa kuigwa na / au huduma za mtandao na orodha SharePoint kujiinua wakati kutoa msikivu sana user interface.

hatua ya mwisho inaweza kuhisi kama wewe ni kuanzia mwanzo, lakini kuzingatia ukweli kwamba jukwaa SharePoint kuanza wewe mbali na makala muhimu yafuatayo:

• Usalama mfano wa kuigwa na matengenezo ya.
• Mfumo menu na matengenezo ya.
• "Master table" (i.e. desturi orodha) na usalama, kujengwa katika matengenezo na ukaguzi.
• Kutafuta.
• Nyuma mwisho zana ushirikiano (BDC).

Kama wewe kuanza na mradi mpya katika studio ya Visual tupu, una mengi ya miundombinu na mabomba ya kujenga kabla ya kupata karibu na nini SharePoint inatoa.

I do believe that Microsoft intends to extend SharePoint in this direction of application development. It seems like a natural extension to the existing SharePoint base. Microsoft’s CRM application provides a great deal of extensibility of the types needed to support header/detail application development. Although those features are in CRM, the technology is obviously available to the SharePoint development team and I expect that it will make its way into the SharePoint product by end of 2008. If anyone has an knowledge or insight into this, tafadhali acha maoni.

</mwisho>